“Being unhinged on TikTok”: Duolingo’s marketing success on social media
On September 2021 the language app Duolingo uploaded a video to TikTok featuring an employee sitting in a chair trying to work. One can see the big plush version of the Duolingo owl – the app's mascot - looming in the background. The audio says: “How am I supposed to live love laugh in these conditions”, implying that Duolingo is manically watching over his worker's progress.
Ever since that video, Duolingo's engagement rate on TikTok has skyrocketed - with every one of their videos getting between 300.000 and a couple of million views. The videos are not that easy to explain. They vary from Duolingo talking about how much he wants to marry Dua Lipa to the owl being in legal trouble because he keeps “being too unhinged”. The account’s most popular video Is Duolingo sliding down a glass door, clearly distressed with the caption saying: “When you use Google Translate instead of actually learning a language.” The audio being used was trending when the video was uploaded in 2021.
Meanwhile, Duolingo’s social media success has had a direct impact on the app’s business. With over more than 500 million downloads Duolingo has become one of the most popular educational apps in the world and its revenue went up from $250 million in 2020 to $500 in 2021.
Their strategy seems rather simple – Follow trends, use their reputation as being unhinged and forcing people to learn a new language and first and foremost: make people talk. In 2021 they replied under a comment of the fast food chain Chick Fil that they wanted the restaurant to come out with a rainbow sauce – a direct reference to the company's homophobic reputation. The comment went viral.
Duolingo certainly is not the first brand to use a rather unusual public relations strategy to market itself. The fast-food company Wendys has been known for roasting not only its customers but also its competition since 2014 and has amassed almost 4 Million followers on Twitter.
However, this type of content and with it Duolingo’s success seems to be rather new and other brands have tried to immolate the strategy. The airline Ryanair has amassed almost 1,8 million followers on the app with an average viewership of around 200k views. They are known for being very sassy online, often roasting their own customers. The train company “die Deutsche Bahn” has a similar strategy – owning their reputation of always being late and using their customers’ discontent to make content – And TikTok users, especially Generation Z, seem to love it.
An unhinged media profile is certainly not a strategy you can use for every single brand or every single customer base. But it seems to be working for some of them. That type of marketing content stands out at a time when almost everyone is tired of being bombarded with 300 ads a minute. It is a good strategy to make people watch your content without paying too much for it. And is that not exactly what all PR professionals want?
Bio: Tessa Mölter is a Public Relations and Digital Marketing student from Germany. She did her undergraduate degree at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Media and Communications and is currently doing a semester abroad at the California State University Northridge. Tessa is currently working at a games company in Germany and is hoping on working in the public relations field in the future.